Genocide in Biafra shocked the whole world: Outbreak of war 40 years ago (06.07.1967)

„Never again” it was said after the genocide of the Nazis. The same thing was hoped for after the terrible crimes of Stalinism. And yet the chain of genocide and mass murder has continued without relent. Genocide continues day by day in Darfur without any real intervention on the part of the international community and Tilman Zülch for the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) recalls the genocide against two million Ibos in Biafra, which began 40 years ago today on 6th July 1967, and he appeals to the media and public opinion to take the horror of Biafra as the lever to make sure that effective measures are taken at last against present-day genocide.

„Every Ibo, man, woman and child, believes today that he is fighting a last battle for his homeland and his dignity. What that means in practice is that the central government sees itself before the choice of either wiping out the whole Ibo nation or of ruling a state, in the body of which a heart is beating with implacable hatred. No one will win.”

(Nigeria’s most important writer and poet, Wole Soyinka, 1969)

Pictures of the agonizing dying in Biafra shocked the whole world 40 years ago. The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) recalls the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of war between Nigeria and its rebel province with this documentation.

On 6th July 1967 the first shot was fired by a weapon of the Nigerian army, which had mobilized against the Christian Ibo in the east of the former colony of Great Britain. Supported by the governments in London and Moscow with large arms deliveries the Nigerian central government under General Yakubo Gowon in the course of the following months led a merciless campaign of destruction against the population and the army of the Republic of Biafra (East Nigeria). In 1966, following the slaughter of 30,000 East Nigerians, mostly members of the Ibo nation, in North Nigeria, which is traditionally under the rule of Islam, Biafra had declared its independence. Nigerian troops occupied the coastal region and the area bordering on Cameroon and enclosed 10 million people in a pocket, whose defenders were able to hold for two years. Hunger was used as a method of waging war and before the eyes of the horrified Europeans the number of children and old people dying of hunger in the summer of 1968 reached 10,000 a day. By 10th January 1970 about two million people had to pay for this genocide with their lives. Other estimates see the number of victims as „only” one million.

Up to this time no conflict in the Third World, not even the Vietnam war, had aroused such a shock and concern in Germany and in other, above all the European countries. European and American churches organised an airlift with food and medicine into the Biafran pocket. The planes landed on a former road. Those mainly responsible for the airlift were the German charities Diakonisches Werk and Caritas, whose aid missions saved the lives of millions.

Failure and solidarity

While the governments of the western world just looked on at the genocide in Biafa without taking any action – with the exception of the small deliveries of arms by France to the hopelessly inferior Biafran army – a „humanitarian international” formed, which protested against the shipments of arms, called for international observers and called for the opening of Biafra for aid deliveries and the ending of the siege. There were in this movement among many others the present foreign Minister, Bernhard Kouchner, the later best-seller writer Frederick Forsyth, the British publicist Auberon Waugh, son of the poet Evelyn Waugh, the circle around Jean Paul Sartre and the Nobel Prize-winner Alfred Kastler, Thomas Hammerberg from Sweden, the Catholic bishop Heinrich Tenhumberg, Jean Ziegler and the spokesman of the displaced persons, Herbert Czaja.

The aid campaigns of the Christian churches and the solidarity declarations of the intellectuals were added to by the starting-up of committees and initiatives in many western countries. In Hamburg the students Klaus Guerke and Tilman Zülch started the „Komitee Aktion Biafra-Hilfe” (Biafran Aid Action Committee), which quickly spread out over the Federal Republic, coordinating the work of as many as one hundred committees. When the two students turned to the socialist university organisation SDS asking for help, it declared Biafra an unimportant contradiction which could be discounted in the light of the socialist sponsors of Nigeria in London and Moscow. The committee received support from quite different personages, such as Heinrich Albertz, Günther Grass, the bishops Heinrich Tenhumberg and Kurt Scharf, the Academy director Joachim Ziegenrücker, the writer Luise Rinser and the painter Oskar Kokoschka.

In a last appeal of the „Komitee Aktion Biafra-Hilfe” of 11th Januars 1970 on the day of the collapse of Biafra the statement was made: „It should be unbearable for every German citizen who is seriously concerned with clearing up the past that with the cooperation of a close ally we see a repetition of what happened in Germany: the wiping out of a people. Remaining silent on this policy of our British ally means complicity.”

Among the signatories of this appeal were: Ilse Aichinger, Stephan Andres, Ernst Bloch, Heinrich Böll, Paul Celan, Günter Eich, Jürgen Habermas, Rudolf Hagelstange, Erich Kästner, Siegfried Lenz, Peter Merseberger, Alexander Mitscherlich, Martin Niemöller, Robert Neumann, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Klaus Wagenbach, Carl Zuckmayr and Gerhard Zwerenz.

Zülch and Guerke published in 1968 the first documentation on the genocide („Biafra: Todesurteil für ein Volk”, „Biafra: Death Sentence for a People”), to which the historian Golo Mann wrote an introduction, an excerpt of which reads: „Those who only think of „revolution” are not much concerned with „humanitarian aid”. A war in which British „imperialists” and Russian „Communists” pull together on the same rope of crime, in which a former colony is fighting for the supposed unity of its state against a tribe which is not even „socialist” is quite uninteresting – Lenin had nothing to say about this. But there are situations in which theory is useless, in which all theory is indeed harmful! All twisted artificial thinking must then be thrown out of the window.”

In this sense the Society for Threatened People, the successor organisation of the „Komitee Aktion Biafra-Hilfe” and now an international human rights organisation, has taken up as its motto: „Not blind on either eye”.

The genocide

When individual German journalists (Werner Holzer, Klaus Natorp and Klaus Stephan) and a military commission made up of British, Canadian, Polish and Swedish military questioned the genocide, the „Komitee Aktion Biafra-Hilfe” published a list of 171 personalities, journalists, politicians, Red Cross helpers, clerics and scientists from three continents, among them being one of the two founders of the Komitee Biafra-Hilfe, who were witnesses of the genocide. No international institution has counted the victims of the genocide. Considerably more than a million civilians, above all children, certainly died from starvation and illnesses caused by hunger, several thousand civilians through massacres, in mass and individual shootings, mainly carried out by the Nigerian army. Thousands fell victim to the bombing raids of the Nigerian air force with British and Soviet planes. The British Sunday newspaper (nicht Tageszeitung) „Observer” reported in the spring of 1968 for example 48 bombing raids against civilian targets. So hospitals were destroyed in nine towns, ten colleges and schools and 16 urban estates. British eye-witnesses reported the shooting of many prisoners and massacres of non-combatants. In the documentation „Soll Biafra überleben?”(„Shall Biafra Survive?”) (Lettner Verlag, Berlin 1969 Hg. Zülch/Guerke) there are 35 reports of eye-witnesses and international journalists reporting from the Biafra pocket.

In Nigeria there has been to this day no admission of the crime of genocide and no attempt to come to terms with the past. Very many of the Biafran elite have settled abroad, mostly in the United States. The places where the fighting in the Biafran war took place in Central and Eastern Nigeria, which are mainly inhabited by the ethnic group of the Ibo, belong today to the regions which are as regards economy and infrastructure the least developed regions of Nigeria. In 1967 however 1,250,000 pupils were attending primary school and 65,000 secondary schools so that Biafra had just as many pupils as Nigeria, whose population is three times larger. There were in addition 33 commercial training colleges with 5,000 students, the University of Nsukka with 3,000 students, 500 Biafran doctors, 700 lawyers and 600 engineers. The federal government has been practising these policies since the end of the war in 1970, says the newspaper „Vanguard” in Lagos on 1st July 2007 and calls for the release at last of Ralph Uwazurike, a lawyer and the chairperson of the MASSOB movement. MASSOB works for the rights of the Ibo population of Eastern Nigeria.

„It comes so fast, the flying death from the dark technology of Soviet forests – a man crossing the road to greet his friend comes much too late – his friend torn into a thousand pieces has quite other concerns than to give a friendly hand-shake at midday.”

(Chinau Achebe, Biafran/Nigerian poet on the thousands of victims of Nigerian bomber produced in the Soviet Union or Great Britain, 1968)

„I doubt whether we are justified in commemorating the dead who fell victim to the genocide if we are evidently not able beyond all frontiers to stand by nations which are dying now which depend on our charitable impulses by domestic and foreign policy considerations. What shall we say if, as we already can imagine, in a few years it is proved and at the same time denied that in Biafra the death of a nation took place while we were actually present, that no summit conference was held to prevent it? A few days after the end of the civil war I saw a picture of such brutal obscenity – a drilling derrick in operation again triumphantly thrusting its shaft into the bosom of the earth. This picture said that everything is normal again, i.e. that the old relationships of power have been installed once more, the taboo of domestic politics has been preserved, there has taken place no interference in foreign politics, which is usually the lever of economic politics. As a contemporary and involved in the economic system in which I live I participate in the power of this drilling derrick. Who would have intervened in Hitler’s politics of destruction if it had remained domestic politics? Some politicians and diplomats consider it improper for a German who was a contemporary of Auschwitz to intervene in the politics of another country. Should Auschwitz act in this way as a brake on brotherhood or should it not be a motive for it?”

Extract from the speech of Heinrich Böll on the Brotherhood Week on 8th

March 1970 following a talk with Ines and Tilman Zülch.

We shall be glad to send on request the following background information:

Appeal of German intellectuals to the German government of 11th January 1975

How true is truth? The case of the international commission of observers in Biafra

1968-1970 (T. Zülch) from „Von denen keiner spricht” („Those who no one talks about”) rororo Aktuell 1975, hg TZ

Elizabeth Etuk: „Warum ich für Biafra kämpfte” („Why I fought for Biafra“) Sonderdruck from DIE ZEIT; July 1966. Etuk was a psychotherapist who studied in New York, returned to the Biafra pocket and who worked on the rehabilitation of traumatised people who had fled to the rain forest. In 1969 she came from Biafra to Germany for two months.

35 eye-witness reports 1966-1969 on the genocide in Biafra from „Soll Biafra überleben?” („Shall Biafra survive?”) Lettner Berlin 1969

Posters/photos can be sent by eMail or fax on: a refugee child, a Biafra demonstration in Berlin, a wounded soldier, Biafra soldiers trained with pieces of wood; posters: Support the life-saving LB, a German army training course for Nigerian officers, care packets for Biafra, Berlin 48 – Biafra 68, Wilson a murderer – an advertisement pillar in Berlin.